Tired of everyone telling you to upgrade to Rails when there are dozens of quality PHP frameworks waiting to be employed? The team I’ve recently consulted for is similarly tired of that hard sell and its members have chosen to solve their dilemma with the Yii framework. After all, they have all invested a great deal of energy in mastering PHP and did not see a point in moving to Ruby when PHP is similarly inspired by Perl, dynamically typed, and rich in community support.

In fact, with the help of the Yii framework, the team has successfully built a dozen of dating sites filled with lovers to the brim. However, this talk will mainly focus on the learnings I have obtained during my journey as a veteran Ruby on Rails developer (RubyConf/RailsConf speaker) consulting for a group of very solid PHP developers. Yii has surprisingly made me feel at home, and the journey went as smoothly as riding the rails of a bullet train.